FIG. 1 illustrates an exemplary Gigabit PON (GPON) system architecture of the background art. The GPON backbone enables the network to fully leverage the bandwidth by concatenating many common protocols within a single stream. Furthermore, access to the voice and data streams is transparent to Local Area Network (LAN) technologies such as Fast Ethernet (FE), Gigabit Ethernet (GE), SONET OC-3-OC-12, as well as their copper counterparts.
There are two major components of the network of FIG. 1: the Optical Line Termination (OLT) and the Optical Network Termination (ONT). Note, the OLT and ONT are also referred to as Network Controller and Network Gateway, respectively. In the system architecture shown in FIG. 1, the OLT acts as a bridge between the GPON network and the upstream user networks (e.g., LAN, Wide Area Network (WAN)). The OLT has the capability to communicate simultaneously with LAN protocols as well as WAN protocols.
Many sensors and systems exist that produce data products at multiple different data rates using different protocols. These include analog and digital sensors and systems for data fusion. Exploitation of data from multiple sensors or systems is significantly enhanced when the data is sampled synchronously and/or when timing is controlled deterministically. The background art has not addressed such data fusion systems with both a passive and synchronous approach. Therefore, there is a need in the art for an apparatus, method and system with widely disparate sensors and systems that produces data at multiple different data rates that can be synchronously sampled, fused, and aggregated into a single telecommunications passive optical or electrical network.